


Liberté

by semele



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-24
Updated: 2014-05-24
Packaged: 2018-01-26 08:50:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1682270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/pseuds/semele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Most days, she doesn’t bother to remember her own name.</p><p>(Written for femslash-minis. 1830!Slayer/OFC.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Liberté

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kwritten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/gifts).



It's easier for young girls, she thinks.

Well, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's never easy, and it doesn't matter what kind of life you've built for yourself, or how many people you're responsible for.

Most days, she doesn’t bother to remember her own name (Liberté, given by a Revolutionary father she never met, and a perpetually terrified mother who learned to read on The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but never fully grasped the concept). Why would she need a name, really? Charles X, Louis Philippe, Talleyrand – those are the important names today, and she couldn’t be further away from them.

“You’re the Slayer. You’re a shadow on the streets of Paris,” says her Watcher with his horrific English accent she’s supposed to be grateful for, because at least he’s speaking French. She knows better than to ask why she can’t have a French Watcher.

“You know, I asked old Wilkins once,” whispers Marie as she’s helping her prepare weapons. “I swear, he made a face like a constipated cat. Apparently those who didn’t run right away got themselves nice chats with Madame la Guillotine. Royalist spies or something. Who’d think?”

Then Marie laughs at her own joke, her knife moving up and down a piece of wood with practiced confidence. She’s not obliged to help, but she still does, out of the goodness of her heart, and something else, something they don’t talk about. Marie has one leg firmly in the other world – she has a name and an income, neighbors who greet her every day, and children who have no idea what their mother did when she was a girl. 

Maybe it would’ve been easier if one of them was called back then, two girls living with old Wilkins and training in case the potential he noticed in them was ever awoken; thinking, the way young, zealous people do, about nothing but The Mission. But nothing happened for a long time, and eventually old Wilkins let them go. Funny, how disappointed they were.

The call came fifteen years later, and, predictably, it only sought out one of them. Except neither of them was ever trained to work alone.

Now one of the children in Marie’s home is not hers, but they pretend he is, for everyone’s sake. Secrets are as easy as breathing itself, learned on shadowy streets, and in the tiny bedroom they shared as girls.

(That one – oh, that one was the easiest to keep. Wilkins never thought to check, never suspected a single thing.)

It’s good to have a friend in Paris, especially this hot July when nights become hot and bloody, and no one in the crowd shouting (yet again) for the death of the aristocrats stops to look at bodies with bite marks on their necks. _Friend_ is a good word, old and solid. A friend is someone who’ll come at dawn, and bring a fresh shirt together with fresh bandages. A shadow on the streets of Paris, as it turns out, really needs fresh shirts, and there are also things she needs in a different way, hungrily and breathlessly, and with abundance of tears.

The new Watcher doesn’t like what she has with Marie, but, being English, he doesn’t have a name for it.


End file.
